War-Zone Tourism: Thinking Beyond Voyeurism and Danger

330 War-Zone Tourism: Thinking Beyond Voyeurism and Danger Gada Mahrouse 1455 Boul de Maisonneuve West Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3G 1M8 [email protected] Abstract Tourism to active war-zones appears to be growing in popularity. Internet searches on the topic indicate that two main issues about this trend have captured the public imaginary: (1) debates about its voyeuristic aspects, and, (2) concerns about the dangers it presents for tourists. In this commentary I suggest that these two preoccupations, in fact, distract us from more disconcerting and complex power dynamics at play in war-zone tourism and propose a reframing of the types of public debates and discussions the topic has provoked. Borrowing from the work of Debbie Lisle (2000), I suggest that more pertinent and productive questions to contemplate pertain to why this tourism trend is growing in popularity at this point in history as well as what subjects are made possible through war-zone tourism encounters. Focusing on media representations of one U.S. based specialized tour operator called War Zone Tours, I argue that what we ought to be concerned with are the ways in which these touristic practices promote a culture of comfort with militarization and privatization of security services, as well as the demarcation practices between Global North tourists and Global South “locals” that are naturalized and perpetuated through them. Published under Creative Commons licence: Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2016, 15(2): 330-345 331 In June 2014, I came upon an article with the title “The rise of dark tourism: When war-zones become travel destinations”. Written by journalist Deborah Kamin and published by the political magazine The Atlantic, it focused on what was described as a growing niche tourism market whereby people voluntarily travel to geopolitical areas/zones where military conflicts are active. Given the regular news reports of people risking their lives to flee from war-torn countries, I was initially taken aback with the thought that some willingly venture into these areas. As a researcher who has examined the racialized power dynamics within various forms of humanitarian/activist political travel to war and conflict zones (Mahrouse, 2014; 2011), I was especially intrigued with the fact that now one can simply “tour” war-zones. That is, unlike other ventures into war-zones undertaken with the intention of helping, I was curious about how such tours are being offered as a type of thrill-seeking adventure travel. Wanting to know more, I began gathering a loose collection of materials from Internet searches using the terms “war tourism” and “danger tourism.” My searches readily turned up myriad guidebooks, films, and websites of tour operators that promote or sell travel to some of the most troubled places in the world. Examples ranged from articles with the heading "10 Most Dangerous Places You Should Definitely Visit" (Bryant, 2009) to excerpts from the familiar Lonely Planet budget-travel guidebooks – which in a 2007 edition for Afghanistan suggested activities such as patrolling with the Afghan army, clearing land mines, and meeting warlords and rebel leaders (Warner, 2008). Other examples included The World's Most Dangerous Places (Pelton, 2003) – a book now in its 5th edition – or the popular VICE Magazine Travel Guides and films about dramatic journeys to places such as Liberia and North Korea. I also found a number of reports from media outlets that have focused on the growing popularity of this trend. One was a 2013 feature in The Guardian entitled “Holidays in danger zones,” which glamorized journeys to countries that most travel advisories warn against (e.g. Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Pakistan). It also listed specialized tour operators that go to these regions. Similarly, another article published in the Daily Mail under the headline “See where the fighting is actually taking place,” focused on tours through the conflicted areas of the Ukraine, which provided tourists flak jackets and armed guards (Driver, 2014). Some ran under sensationalist headlines such as “Rather chat up a warlord than lie on a beach? Try a dangerous-places tour” (Clark, 2010). Others were presented as “human interest” types of stories about individuals. These included a report in the New York Times on a tourist from Japan who went to Syria from where he posted graphic dispatches of the battle to Facebook (Somaiya, 2013). Another focused on a Swedish father who, concerned about his sons’ attraction to violent video games like “Call of Duty,” sought to show them the actual impacts of war by taking them to witness the conflict in Israel/Palestine (Rundquist, 2014). More recently, CNN reported on Andrew Drury, a husband, father and the owner of a successful construction company from Surrey in the UK War-Zone Tourism 332 who has for twenty years “led a double life” by visiting the world's most dangerous destinations including “the insurgent heartlands of Afghanistan” (Monks, 2016). Combing through these materials, I noticed that the same two themes kept coming up. The first was debates about the educational virtues versus the harms of voyeurism in war-zone tourism. Some reporters – such as the one who wrote about the father who took his sons to Israel/Palestine – raised questions about the potential to educate and sensitize people by showing them the effects of war up- close. Similarly, the message that comes through the aforementioned CNN article is that seeing is learning. In it, James Wilcox, founder of British tour company Untamed Borders, is quoted stating: “We take people to places that are difficult to access and give them a variety of experiences – the geopolitical stories... the culture and history…. We try to see countries for the complex places they are and not a broad stereotype” (Monks, 2016). Other reports prompt readers to reflect on the ethics of the voyeuristic practices that war zone tourism entails more generally (see Peisner, 2012; Freedman, 2010). The latter was perhaps most vivid in a description in The Atlantic feature article which described people “armed with binoculars and cameras, eager for a glimpse of smoke and even carnage” (Kamin, 2014). The second theme that permeated media reports on war-zone tourism was, predictably, danger. The issue of danger typically emerged through commentators speculating about why some tourists willingly place themselves in harm’s way by opting to go into war and conflict zones. Also commonly invoked were tourists’ first-person accounts of how they boldly came close to danger. For example, an article published in The Telegraph (2009) focused on Gordon Moore, “a great grandfather from the UK who ignored warnings from the Foreign Office and went to Iraq as part of the first tour to enter the country since the war broke out in 2003.” The article goes on to state that Moore was “greeted by the sound of a bomb blast within minutes of arriving”. This growing attraction to “hostile environments” is explained by the president of the Adventure Travel Trade Association, who states: “All the buzz is for destinations that have some sort of edge” (Monks, 2016). Indeed, while there seems to be a general consensus that there is a striking exponential increase in both the supply and demand of war-zone tourism as a niche market, the popular culture reports indicate that it is questions of voyeurism and danger that have captured the public imaginary. In this piece, I wish to encourage critical examination of the topic by reframing the types of public debates and discussions it has provoked. I want to suggest that to better understand the production and consumption of war-zone tourism one must employ an analytical lens comprised of critical studies on tourism that privilege questions of racialized relations of power, privilege, mobility and space within past and present global relations (Ateljevic, Pritchard and Morgan, 2007; Coles and Church, 2007; Clifford, 1997; Enloe, 1990; Kaplan, 1996). Specifically, I suggest that more generative questions pertain to why this tourism trend is gaining popularity at this point in history, as well as how selling tourism to war-zones furthers what has been ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2016, 15(2): 330-345 333 called a “politics of life” which presupposes who can and cannot purchase controlled levels of risk (Fassin, 2007, 500-501). 1 Specifically, my commentary posits that what begs questioning is how this phenomenon is shaped through the co-constitutive systems of class and race within neoliberal globalization. In what follows, I apply these questions to the media representations of one US-based specialized tour operator called War Zone Tours (herein referred to as WZT). As a commentary piece, rather than making definitive claims, the points I raise merely seek to inform further studies by drawing attention to the lesser examined concerns of this tourism trend. As I will demonstrate, WZT lends itself well as an example because it has received a significant amount of media attention. Focusing on WZT, I aim to show that a particular analytical approach is needed to reveal additional concerns about power within such touristic practices. Part 1 – What is known about tourism in war-zones? Scholarship on the relationship between war/political conflict and tourism has mainly focused on battlefield or remembrance tourism where wars or conflicts took place in the past (Butler and Suntikul, 2013). When tourism studies have focused on tourism during war or active conflict it has been mainly through political economy frameworks that examine how the tourism industry is impacted when conditions of peace and security are threatened. Other studies examine state/government efforts to continue tourism in the face of war and how the tourism industry is detrimentally affected by military conflicts (Isaac, 2013; Krakover, 2012), or have quantified the losses of tourism revenues caused by escalations in violence (Larsen, 2011).

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